[ale] Hardware OS ?

[Joseph A Knapka]

Stephen Turner wrote:
> holy cow! i mean a computers os is nothing but 0/1 but still have they
> actually turned code into hardware? 
> here check it out
> (http://www.bodacion.com)

No. What they've done is to produce a "traditional" embedded system
that provides web services. A "traditional" embedded system doesn't
use a general purpose OS. Rather, it accesses all hardware services
directly. Now, in general there will be some kind of abstraction
layer between the "application" code and the hardware, but the
line between the application and the lower-level code will be
much harder to draw than in the case of a general-purpose OS.
And because the software has direct control over the hardware,
it can be optimized for a particular task - for example, streaming
video data from a disk drive - and therefore perform that
task faster than a general-purpose OS, because a general-
purpose OS has to worry about arbitrary hardware access
patterns, fairness to all processes, etc.

Note that HYDRA does have a software kernel, but it's very
small and EEPROM-resident.

Cheers,

-- Joe





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